http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050704&s=blumenthal
Sam Brownback's Blind Ambition Tour
by MAX BLUMENTHAL
[posted online on June 20, 2005]
On June 6, just two weeks after declaring, "All of the
President's nominees--both now and in the
future--deserve a fair up or down vote," Kansas
Senator Sam Brownback used a parliamentary maneuver to
block the nomination of Julie Finley to be US
Ambassador to the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe. Finley is one of the Republican
Party's most effective fundraisers, "the queen of soft
money," as the New York Times's Jill Abramson
described her in 2000. She is a forceful advocate for
the expansion of NATO and "democracy promotion" in
former Soviet-bloc countries--issues that would occupy
a major part of her job at OSCE. She is also the
founder of Women in the Senate and House (WISH), which
raises money on behalf of female Republican candidates
who are prochoice. It was that aspect of Finley's
résumé that riveted Brownback's attention, even though
abortion is practically irrelevant to the mission of
OSCE.
To block Finley, Brownback exercised the privilege
called a hold, by which a senator can put a
presidential nomination in purgatory indefinitely.
Brownback's hold went largely under the radar in
Washington, but outside the Beltway, his base was
ecstatic. On May 3 the Republican National Coalition
for Life had issued a press release declaring, "We are
concerned that, given [Finley's] history of support
for liberal abortion policies, she will be able to
promote her proabortion views through the OSCE." The
Republican National Coalition for Life is directed by
Colleen Parro, who told me she "admires Brownback very
much for blocking [Finley]." She shares Brownback's
belief that the Republican Party should require a
litmus test on abortion for GOP members who seek
promotion through the party's ranks.
"There are a lot of issues about which reasonable
people can agree," Parro said. "That takes place all
the time in the Republican Party on matters that are
not fundamental. But the right to life is fundamental.
You are either prolife or you're not. If you're not,
and you want to be a Republican, you should just be
quiet."
In 1990 conservative doyenne Phyllis Schlafly started
the Republican National Coalition for Life to counter
Republicans for Choice's campaign for a prochoice
platform at the 1992 Republican National Convention.
There Parro, a veteran antiabortion activist, locked
horns with Finley, who had thrown her fundraising
muscle behind Republicans for Choice's efforts. In the
platform battle, the Christian right emerged
victorious. By last year's convention, the GOP's
prochoice wing was completely marginalized. On the
convention's second day Parro hosted an extravagant
luncheon for social conservative leaders at Central
Park's Tavern on the Green. While she and her guests
made the requisite calls for Bush's re-election, the
spotlight was on their hero, Sam Brownback, who was
honored with an award and given the podium for a
speech. The movement was beginning to size up his
presidential potential.
Brownback's ambition is becoming clearer by the day.
He has already made trips to the primary states of
Iowa and New Hampshire. And just as his likely
contender for the Republican nomination, Senate
majority leader Bill Frist, exploited Terri Schiavo to
burnish his "culture of life" credentials with the
GOP's religious base, Brownback has used Julie Finley.
The difference is that Frist got burned publicly and
was widely criticized for his maladroit handling of
the Schiavo affair, while Brownback received credit
from the religious right for standing up on principle
to President Bush, while most of the mainstream media
gave him a pass. Having reaped the political benefits
of opposing Finley, Brownback quietly lifted his hold
on her nomination on June 10. With social legislation
as his tool, Brownback leverages the support of the
Christian right forces, which helped lift him from
obscurity more than a decade ago. The culture war also
serves as Brownback's means to divert attention from
the alliances with elitist religious cults and
corporate front groups he has assiduously cultivated
throughout his career.
A soft-spoken farmer's son and former broadcaster who
attended auctioneering school, Brownback married the
heiress of the Topeka Capitol-Journal and other media
properties, including television stations. "While the
Kansas conservative style generally features loud,
sweaty campaigning at the most energetic and
antihierarchical sort of Protestant churches," Thomas
Frank writes in What's The Matter With Kansas,
"Brownback favors the approach of the unhurried
insider, the ultramontane, even." Brownback began his
political career in 1986 as Kansas's youngest-ever
Agriculture Secretary, a post to which he was
appointed under archaic rules by a panel of
agribusiness leaders. Among Brownback's most notable
accomplishments was the gutting of restrictions on the
herbicide atrazine, which has been proven to increase
the incidence of lymphoma among residents in areas
where it is used. By the time Brownback's appointment
to Agriculture Secretary was ruled unconstitutional in
December 1994, he had already been elected to the US
House.
Two years after winning his House seat, Brownback
declared his candidacy to replace then-Senator Bob
Dole, who had abandoned his seat to run for President.
First Brownback vanquished Dole's chosen replacement,
the prochoice Republican Sheila Frahm. Then he ground
out a commanding victory in the general election
against centrist Democrat Jill Docking, who had made
Brownback's far-right views a central theme of her
campaign. The race was dead even throughout, but as
the two neared the finish line, Brownback suddenly
pulled away. He attributed the last-minute surge to a
push by Christian right forces. "Pat [Robertson] got
me elected in 1996," he recently told Newsweek, It is
true that Brownback generated unprecedented support
from social conservatives in his victory, but
something much darker was also at play, a scheme he
remains mum about to this day.
In June 1996, during Brownback's run against Frahm, he
was visited by Carlos Rodriguez, a consultant to Triad
Management Services, a shady, for-profit corporation
run by a veteran Republican fundraiser. After the
meeting, Rodriguez shot off a memo reading, "This is
perhaps one of the most, if not the most important
races in the nation in regards to the conservative
coalition. As such we must do everything in our power
to ensure a Brownback victory in the primary." Triad
funneled cash to Brownback's campaign through its
scores of clients, including two of Brownback's
in-laws. Triad's finance director even accompanied
Brownback to Republican headquarters to dial for
dollars. Under federal election law, corporations are
not allowed to make direct contributions or provide
free services (like fundraising help) to politicians.
After helping him defeat Frahm, Triad steered $410,000
to a front group, Citizens for the Republic Education
Fund, that ran a single attack ad against Docking
repeatedly throughout a two-week period, propelling
Brownback to victory. Democratic Senate investigators
believe this money came almost entirely from the
Wichita-based Koch Industries, America's largest
privately owned energy company, which had already
contributed more than $30,000 to Brownback's campaign.
Though Brownback denies knowledge of the
contributions, he has been the darling of the Koch
Family Foundation during his years in Washington.
Brownback has a 100 percent rating from the Cato
Institute, an antigovernment, libertarian think tank
founded by Charles Koch, who directs it along with his
brother David. Brownback toes Cato's line on blocking
the passage of hate-crimes laws. ("Shouldn't our law
make room for the possibility that people can exhibit
some variation of bigotry in life--but then change?"
the associate director of Cato's Institute for
Constitutional Studies said before the Senate
Judiciary Committee in 1999.) Brownback has written a
glowing blurb for a Cato-published book promoting the
privatization of Social Security, and he supports
Cato's efforts to gut environmental regulations like
the Oil Pollution Act and the Clean Water Act, which
have been used to levy $35 million in fines against
Koch Industries for illegally dumping waste across the
country. The Koch family has rewarded Brownback
handsomely for his efforts on their behalf, donating
$64,000 to his 2002 re-election campaign and $30,000
to his Restore America PAC. That same year, Brownback
was fined by the Federal Election Commission for
violating election guidelines in 1996 through his
dealings with Triad Management.
In spite of his pious public image, Brownback's
spiritual life seems to be defined by his wealth and
corporate ties. In 2002 he converted to Catholicism
under the guidance of the Rev. John McCloskey, a
leader of the secretive right-wing cult Opus Dei. At
the time. McCloskey operated out of a K Street office
with a mission to spread the Gospel exclusively to the
rich and powerful, whom he calls "the righteous
remnant." Brownback refuses to discuss his conversion,
perhaps because of the controversy McCloskey has
generated by, for instance, demanding that Catholics
who use birth control leave the Church. Or perhaps
it's because McCloskey leads an organization founded
by a clerical fascist, Josemaría Escrivá, an ally of
Spain's Franco. Escrivá prescribed that members sleep
on wooden boards and flagellate themselves to expiate
their sins. Brownback is also reticent about his
membership in The Family, a shadowy Christian-right
group comprising all-male elites. Some of its most
famous members have included Watergate crook Charles
Colson, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint and the
brutal Somalian former dictator, Mohammed Siad Barre.
"The goal [of The Family] is an "invisible" world
organization led by Christ--that's what they aspire
to," Jeff Sharlet, a journalist who revealed The
Family's inner workings in Harper's Magazine, said in
an interview with Alternet.
Few Kansans, including his conservative Christian
admirers, are aware Brownback travels in such circles.
He is better known as "the new internationalist," as
the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof has decribed
him, working across the aisle to stop human
trafficking and genocide in Africa. He's the racial
healer who presses for a formal US government apology
to African-Americans and Native Americans. Or he's the
preacher who channels Martin Luther King Jr. to
promote his values. "A spring has begun," he declared
in April during an antiabortion rally on the Mall in
Washington. "A spring when all babies...babies of all
races will be born, not aborted, and grow up playing
with each other." He's presented himself as anything
but just another Republican insider.
With a bill headed for the Senate that would increase
federal funding for research on surplus stem-cell
lines, Brownback is poised to set himself apart from
the crowd once again. The bill is likely to garner
support from a super-majority of sixty
senators--enough to override Bush's promised veto.
Brownback is vowing to prevent the bill from reaching
the floor; he will even filibuster, if necessary. As
he told the Kansas City Star on June 6, "I've learned
how to delay and stop things."
President Bush, his agenda on Social Security and
other issues stalled, lashed out in frustration on
June 14, claiming the Democrats "stand for nothing but
obstruction." But Bush neglected to mention
Brownback's hold on the Finley nomination and his
threatened filibuster against the stem-cell research
bill. The obvious hypocrisy of his opposition to
filibusters against Bush's judicial nominees while
embracing the tactic against the appointment of
prochoice Julie Finley and stem-cell research doesn't
bother Brownback or his Christian-right supporters.
On June 13 Brownback informed the Topeka
Capital-Journal editorial board that he would not seek
another term in the Senate but was exploring a run for
the presidency instead. "It's such a long race that
you've kind of got to line up way early, particularly
if you haven't been out in that field before," he
said. Grandstanding is an accelerator for his
ambition.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
